Age of Trade

Hi, the GPT tile cought my eye, but I also like this kind of games, was playing a lot of Transport Ferver. I like how prices change depending on supply, and how different settlements have different needs. Background image looks good but is to low-res. Settlement graphics look good. Did you generate visuals with AI also? If GPT generated all the code, that is quite impressive, I had issues with it on much smaller projects. Did you made some devlog on the process?

The first filing when seeing the game is that you are sole trader with one caravan and you just travel through the world buying cheap selling high. It can be played like that, but the production chanins collapse quite fast, due to cities not haveing enough resources. Making it quite hard to trade enything. I ended up just looking around the cities to find anything that can be bought just be able to sell it somehwere, no metter the price. But after some time all settlements had 0 of everyting.

So the game is intended to be played as a manager of a trading company with a fleet of caravans. But for me the game breaks eather way. You start with a small fleet and just a little money, so I couldn't expend enough before the world production collapses. It seams like the game can be solved with some realy painstaking planning, but that makes the game too hard. It could probbably make it somewhat easier  with some tools to help you with that, like resource production a and demand map visualisations, some very good route editor and manager, some notifications on route efficiencies, maybe something more.

The solution to this production collapse would be either, to have oponent traders with their supply routes, and you come in functioning world as a new trader, which is somewhat harder to implement. Or you just create more self sustainable cities. Or make some resources like tools and clothing drain much slower, and don't drain all resources while production is stopped due to some other resource not being availabe.

Some other notes:

-Your stock in every settlement is a bit confusing. You have a store in every city, and people by from there? I assumed when you visit the city you sell bulk to some vendor and leave. I was confused at first, when sell the goods I didn't recieve money. Then I noticed the stock and assume that tere is unloading time, but it seems not. 

-It would be nice to have a list of all your vehicles.

-I think when ilde you shoud be loosing money due to maintanance, currently it seams that the money supply rises.

-Settlements should maybe have their own money supply, ie. how much you can sell to them. 

-When in a settlement you should be able to select transprot on the map with a second click, it would be more intuitive. I took me couple of minutes to find the button in the city view.

-space to pause the game.

-a conviniet tool would be when some good is selected it's price to be shown on the map near all cities.

I played an hour or so, and like the concpet, but it needs a lot of balancing and polish. I will follow further developement of the project.